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Truthout.org…
News Briefs
Monday 10 January 2011
Tom DeLay Sentenced to
Three Years in Prison
: "A federal judge Monday sentenced former
Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to three years in prison for
his role in orchestrating a scheme to illegally funnel nearly $200,000
in corporate cash to Texas political candidates in 2002."
Federal Murder Charges
Filed in Giffords Shooting Case
: "A 22-year-old man was
formally charged Sunday with two counts of murder and three counts of
attempted murder in a shooting rampage that killed six people and
critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Lee Loughner, of
Tucson, Ariz., is in federal custody. He'll go before a federal
magistrate on Monday and could face additional state and federal
charges, including domestic terrorism."
Thom Hartmann | Put Lou
Dobbs Out to Pasture: "Under the guise of satisfying a consumer
demand for low prices, multinationals have accelerated outsourcing ever
since the Reagan years and pushed the 'free trade' and 'globalization'
ideology that has given us the NAFTA and GATT/WTO processes initiated
under President George H. W. Bush and finished by President Bill
Clinton. As a direct result, American blue-collar workers saw their
jobs vanish as factories making things from jeans to precision tools
moved to Mexico and other countries."
Serious Guns and White
Terrorism: "Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was
kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy such a serious
weapon? The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was a
serious weapon - a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol with an extended
magazine. Some weapons like that were illegal to sell in the US from
1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It is now legal to
sell and own them.”
Nick Turse | Empire of
Bases: "Like all empires, the US military's empire of bases will
someday crumble. These bases, however, are not apt to fall like so many
dominos in some silver-screen last-stand sequence. They won't, that is,
go out with the 'bang' of futuristic Alamos, but with the 'whimper' of
insolvency. Last year, rumbling began even among Washington lawmakers
about this increasingly likely prospect. 'I do not think we should be
spending money to have troops in Germany 65 years after World War II.
We have a terrible deficit and we have to cut back,' said Massachusetts
Democratic Congressman Barney Frank."
Michael Winship | Hate
Speech, the Right's Magic Bullet
: "The Russian playwright Anton
Chekhov had a rule: if you show a gun in the first act, by the time the
curtain falls, it has to go off. For weeks and months, that gun, the
weapon of angry rhetoric and intemperate rabble rousing, has been
cocked and loaded in plain view on the American stage; Saturday morning
outside a shopping mall in Tucson, Arizona, it went off again and again
and again."
Dean Baker | The
Progressive Case Against Obama's New Team
: "Most reports on the
selection of William Daley as President Obama's new chief of staff and
Gene Sperling as the head of his National Economic Council included a
few lines of criticism from progressives who were unhappy with these
picks. Since there was not much space for the argument, these lines
probably left many readers wondering why progressives don't like Daley
and Sperling."
How a Red Herring About
WikiLeaks Killed Whistleblower Protections
"WikiLeaks
killed our whistleblower protections bill - sort of. After an
unbelievable roller coaster of fear and fallacies, votes on and off,
and a flurry of activity, when the lights went out in the Capitol
Building on December 22, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act
was dead. It may be one of the few times in history when legislation
has passed both chambers unanimously within two weeks and still failed
to get to the president's desk."
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